Police Academy's George Gaynes made silliness an artform

As the father on Punky Brewster and the doddering police commander Eric Lassard, famous for a scene in which he attempts to make a speech while being orally pleasured, the actor always threw himself into the material

Versatile character actor George Gaynes died in his daughter’s home in North Bend, Washington, at age 98 on Monday, leaving behind an enormous body of work that stretched across numerous sitcoms, made-for-TV movies, features films, theater and even opera productions all around the world.

Gaynes is probably best known for his film and television work in the 1980s – as an adoptive father on Punky Brewster, doddering police commandant Eric Lassard in seven Police Academy films, and a seasoned soap opera star besotted with Dustin Hoffman’s alter ego in 1984’s Tootsie.

Gaynes – born George Jongejans in Helsinki, Finland – had an incredibly commanding presence on film, with a rich, booming voice and authoritative demeanor, which he often subverted to great comic effect, especially in the Police Academy series. As Commandant Lassard, he managed to project all the gravitas you might expect of a high-ranking police official placed in command of the Metropolitan Police Academy, but played the part with an abiding befuddlement and overly sincere delivery that elevated the character beyond the kind of bureaucratic, blowhard comedic foil lampooned by so many comedies of the era into a memorably funny character ultimately as beloved by fans of the franchise as any of the characters to appear in the films.

In one his best-known scenes as Commandant Lassard, Gaynes’s attempt to deliver a speech to his misfit cadets is disrupted by a randy fan eager to surreptitiously disrupt his train of thought. Gaynes’s performance in the decidedly not safe for work scene is a master class in slapstick performance, beginning with the way his voice fluctuates to indicate his distress and elevating to the point where his features are distorted into a hilarious grimace. Where another actor might have looked at the scene and seen an opportunity to play a character attempting to retain their dignity, Gaynes commits fully to the lewd anarchy of the moment.

This willingness to commit to his material is also on display in his role as Henry Warninmont in Punky Brewster, which saw Gaynes play the straight man to a host of adorable children and a dog, a situation many actors might have seen as repellent. A given scene in any episode of the show, which ran for four seasons starting in 1984, might find Gaynes playing the part of grouchy disciplinarian or a warm, kindhearted father, sometimes in quick succession, as in the following clip.

In his interaction with Punky, Gaynes is completely believable as a father exasperated by his foster daughter’s inability to succeed academically, but he also expresses real warmth, not annoyed in the least by Punky’s quips as much as appreciative of her spirit. Even more impressive might be the short bit that follows, where he converses with Punky’s dog at the kitchen table. There’s nothing knowing about Gaynes’s delivery there, no wink at the camera to indicate he recognizes how silly the scene is or that he is above relatively lightweight material. He simply plays the scene realistically.

While Gaynes might never have achieved leading man status or became a household name for all his hard work, he did achieve something very few actors are capable of – he elevated everything he appeared in without hogging the spotlight. Through his commitment to the material, his warmth, his willingness to play the straight man when another actor was tasked with garnering laughs and instinct for comedy when placed in the spotlight, he carved an indelible path from his first role in NBC Television Theater in 1955 to his last, in the 2003 film Just Married.